Two anniversaries highlight progress

We’ve made substantial progress in combating hate and bigotry in recent decades, but racism and other forms of prejuduice remain stubborn and hard to eradicate, like rodents that have taken up residence in dank and distant corners of a cellar.
Consider the recent remarks of Billy Roper, an avowed white supermacist from Arkansas who was organizing a march in his home state against the “threat” of Sharia law. He flatly stated in a podcast that “we want to send a message to Muslims that they’re not welcome in our state. And ultimately we want to send a message to Muslims that they’re not welcome in our nation and, of course, endgame, on our planet.”
Rarely have more chilling words been spoken in contemporary American life. Really, more chilling words have rarely been spoken outside of Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s.
It’s worth reflecting on the progress we have made and the battles that remain as we look back on this week in June 1967. It was an eventful month that included the release of the Beatles’ landmark “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors. On June 12, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision in one of the most celebrated cases in recent decades, Loving vs. Virginia, which eradicated state statutes that outlawed interracial marriage.
From the remove of 50 years, prohibiting couples from marrying based on the color of their skin seems an obvious affront to individual liberty. It also seems conspicuously pointless – what harm could possibly befall a community as a result of a union between two consenting and committed adults? The U.S. Supreme Court understood this, with Chief Justice Earl Warren writing that to deny the “fundamental freedom” of marriage “on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the state’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.”
Today, 1-in-6 couples in the United States are racially mixed. While some still find disfavor and antagonism from some quarters, they no longer face the hurdle of state and local laws that are clearly discriminatory.
The day after the Loving vs. Virginia decision was handed down, President Lyndon Johnson announced his nominee to replace retiring Justice Tom Clark. His pick was Thurgood Marshall, a onetime U.S. Court of Appeals judge, Johnson’s solicitor general and the first African-American to be nominated to the nation’s highest court. As a private lawyer. Marshall was no stranger to the Supreme Court, having argued 32 cases before it, winning 29, including Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, where the court ruled that public-school segregation was unconstitutional. Marshall took his seat on the Supreme Court later that year after the Senate confirmed him by a 69-to-11 vote.
As we recall Marshall on the 50th anniversary of his nomination to the Supreme Court and 24 years after his death, we should remember an observation he once made that’s still applicable in our times: “In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.”